


A Moth Beats Its Wings

by DreamsAtDusk



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:46:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamsAtDusk/pseuds/DreamsAtDusk
Summary: With the mystery of the Revenant's disappearance at the Battle of Tereberg still unsolved, Cheris has been asked to investigate...with Jedao Two in tow.  But another discovery proves to be waiting even closer to home.
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Jedao Two
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Moth Beats Its Wings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PlayerProphet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlayerProphet/gifts).



> This diverges from canon prior to Glass Cannon, but after the end of Revenant Gun.

Even when she was more him than he was, somehow Jedao still managed to drag Cheris into disaster with only sideways, inadequate warning.

Such as now.

The two of them pelted down a corridor and careened around a corner, boots skidding slightly on the faint biofilm-like… _something_ coating the floor here. The sight would have looked at home in the more comedic-leaning of the dueling shows she liked to watch. But humor was rather robbed of this particular business by the fact that had them fleeing. They had been fired upon.

By servitors. 

Fortunately, said shockingly trigger-happy servitors had been well separated from them by distance. The head start had she and Jedao nearly to the needlemoth by now. In the lead, Cheris barely registered the movement at the mouth of a cross-hall before eleven years’ worth of Shuos reflexes had her blast yet another servitor into shrapnel.

(Even as the Mwennin girl within winced, saddened and baffled. _Hostile_ servitors.)

Jedao followed her onto the moth soon after, Cheris having warned 1491625 about the need for immediate takeoff once they were onboard well before they reached it. And so it was not long at all before she was able to breathe easier - easier only to a very precise and very small degree - as they shot away from the abandoned station in their wake, cloaked and with no evidence of pursuit. A cantankerous exchange with 1491625 later and Cheris exited the cockpit to confront the most immediate issue.

There was plenty enough unsavory about the sight even on the surface to explain the roil of emotion she felt. Distant though the hostile servitors had been, they were what they were: a round or two had connected and Jedao…. Jedao had been on the move like a flash of lightning, jerking between Cheris and the line of fire. That, too, added to the complex feelings crawling up her limbs now.

Blood had oozed from his wounds as they ran, viscous and black and horrifying, and as she watched now, she could spot something _writhing_ beyond the holes in his clothing. She tried to stop looking, but even the memory of it juddered on her nerves like nails on slate. As if facing Jedao were not enough, he was less human than he had ever been.

“So. What do those—“ Her tongue nearly tripped on what term to use. Rogue? Even to her, someone who had befriended servitors so long ago and treated them as best she could like people, it came too easily to think of hostile servitors as automatically repellent in some way, wrong. In the end, she let context bear the burden. “—servitors have to do with the _Revenant_?”

Already certain there was something to it, the look on Jedao’s face made her even more so. Cheris may have gazed at her own features in reflections for the past eleven years, but his were still all-too familiar, all too ready to make the brittle shards strewn through her psyche reverberate. What was familiar in an entirely different way was the look of teenaged mulishness that came over incongruously middle-aged features at the question. That was something Dzannis Paral had seen on more than one of her students’ faces. 

“ _Jedao_ ,” she gritted out. “What happened on that damned moth?”

* * *

One could argue that she should have been more suspicious from the start. But this was the Shuos Hexarch they were talking about: Cheris was already as suspicious of Mikodez as Kel inclination and the ghost of Jedao’s memories could make her. Naturally, this meant even a Nirai engineer could not have forced anymore in there with a hydraulic press.

But Mikodez had also done far more for her people than she could have imagined anyone in the hexarchate even trying, saved those that could be saved even as Cheris herself had had to abandon them and put her hope in nothing at all. He had given them a future. She still didn’t really understand why he had done it, despite the time Jedao-inclination at the base of her skull had spent mulling it over. But he had acted and that was what mattered. 

And so, she had heard him out, figuring she could do that much. Dzannis’s existence had begun to taste a little dull, as loathe as she was to admit it. Even knowing that a ‘small errand’ as proposed by Shuos Mikodez was surely anything _but_ small, she had still bitten. And that was when he dropped the other equally small, nay, _infinitesimal_ detail. 

Take Jedao along.

Cheris had nearly stood up then and there, at risk of knocking into the dish of sesame candies presently being extended in her direction. It was only a confession from Mikodez that kept her in place long enough to further consider.

They still, the hexarch admitted, had no idea what had happened during the Battle of Tereberg to cause the shearmoth Revenant’s crew to mutiny. Jedao, ensconced at the Citadel of Eyes for all the time following, had steadfastly refused to divulge any details, but the Shuos remained convinced he knew something.

Who better to see what she could wring out of him than Cheris? “After all,” Mikodez had said brightly. “Who has ever been better at catching Jedao in a bind, than Jedao himself? He’s his own worst enemy.”

A test in itself, that. Cheris had bridled internally, a bright, sharp jab of emotion. But even the reaction proved the point: she showed nothing of it to Mikodez and that was something that Captain Kel Cheris of Heron Company could never have accomplished. Jedao though…he had fooled everyone for so long.

Even himself.

In the end - with a great deal more debate wedged in between start and finish - she agreed. Mikodez did not think the reason Jedao had given Cheris two years ago held much water. (And it would be appreciated, the hexarch had added mildly, if she would refrain from blowing any more holes into her prospective traveling companion.). Even outside the chains of the high calendar, the idea of that many Kel revolting and running off, never to be heard of again, was dubious at best. The chance that what the truth was had something, _anything_ , to do with Kujen was too great of a risk. She would investigate the tenuous trail Shuos agents had recently scared up, more rumor and hearsay than anything. 

And she would do it with a recalcitrant fox kit of a mass murderer in tow. 

* * *

It had proven more difficult than Cheris anticipated, despite her anticipation having involved sensations the emotional equivalent of unanesthetized tooth removal. Jedao himself had been a model passenger most of the time. In fact, he had been so quiet and unobtrusive that she experienced a profound swell of dissonance just to witness it. They were on the trail of the Revenant, but she felt the true ghost was before her: a self-haunted teenage boy with bleakness a kilometer deep in his gaze. 

Her patience drew more taut every day, little threads fraying off until but a hair’s width was left. It trembled with the harmonics of a building fury as Jedao stared back at her with those young-old eyes and said only, “The Kel rebelled.”

It wasn’t the repetition, nor the bone-certainty he was lying to her face (better or worse, than lying in her own head and then dying to save her?). Not the dregs of adrenaline that had chased her down that corridor or the sheer frustration of what had so far been a wild fox chase.

It was that tiny tremulous look at the very corners of his eyes as he spoke. 

Cheris surged forward, eyes blazing and spine straight and enraged as a calendrical blade.

“Bullshit! What _happened_? Was Kujen behind it? Is that it? You WILL tell me, even if I have to find a way to eat every memory you have left. Because I will _not_ let him do this again!”

It came like the links of a chain then: realization that she was shouting, the sight of Jedao’s eyes going wide with shock and the third piece, looping in tight between: recognition that what had plagued her every step of this journey was a sense of _self_ -loathing, so powerful it bit at her knees and head and heart all at once.

And as if she had suddenly seen ninefox eyes in her shadow all over again for the first time, Cheris went still. Took a step back. A second. Sank onto a bench.

“This isn’t mine,” she whispered. It was to herself - selves - but Jedao leaned cautiously closer as if the better to hear. 

“Cheris, I’m— I—“ He swallowed. His hand rose and froze. There read fear in every too-sharp line of the tendons on its back. And she remembered a place she had never been, on a planet with a lost name and glimmering winged insects dancing in the air as artillery fired and blood scent filled her nostrils. Whether it was Cheris that then reached out to grasp the hand hovering in front of her or Jedao, reaching out across centuries to himself far too late (or, maybe, not), she was not sure.

Maybe it was both.. His fingers tightened on hers as if they had spasmed closed.

“I know you don’t think you can trust anyone. I know it better than you can imagine. But…we want the same thing, Jedao.”

“What do we want?” He could have said it in so many ways. But there was no recoil in his words, no dismissiveness. Not even anger. Instead, his voice was quietly desperate.

“For…for all of it not to have been meaningless.”

They have killed their soldiers and their mothers and their friends and nothing can ever make it right. But it mattered that the good she hoped they had clawed forth for others had a chance.

Jedao let out a breath and the crouch he had taken in nearing her folded him onto his knees at her feet.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.” His sigh sounded like the surf whispering on the beaches of the City of Ravens Feasting. “It…it was Kujen. Sort of. Not how you’re thinking.”

Cheris drew back their joined hands until Jedao, however hesitantly, seated himself next to her on the bench. There was a time for kneeling, hummed a voice at the base of her skull. But that was not this and best he come to learn that difference. 

And so he told her, of _Revenant_ and the moths, of those last slaves of Nirai Kujen’s, unknown and still trapped. They both knew even as the words were spoken, that there was more to do now.

They could not make the past right. But the future was a vector all its own.


End file.
